


Ten Things Jack Harkness Did In All The Years of His Life

by princessoftheworlds



Series: The Many Lives and Lies of Jack Harkness [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Big Finish Compliant, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Jack-Centric, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23858311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessoftheworlds/pseuds/princessoftheworlds
Summary: From life to death(s).
Relationships: Gray (Torchwood) & Jack Harkness, Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones, Jack Harkness/John Hart, Jack Harkness/Other(s), Ninth Doctor/Jack Harkness/Rose Tyler, The Doctor/Jack Harkness
Series: The Many Lives and Lies of Jack Harkness [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1779442
Comments: 10
Kudos: 52





	Ten Things Jack Harkness Did In All The Years of His Life

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos to the lovely [jaune-chat](https://jaune-chat.tumblr.com/). for editing! I wrote this in like 5 hours and went through a whole cycle of emotions. I hope you experience that journey reading this. Also, this is Big Finish compliant, specifically with the Lives of Captain Jack. If you can afford it, I definitely recommend giving the Torchwood releases a listen, but also, a PSA: Big Finish is a small company. Please, please, please, I swear to god, please DO NOT pirate their content. Support creators.
> 
> I also think the formatting for this got a bit wonky when I transferred over from Google Docs, so ouch.

**1\. Let go of his little brother’s hand**

When Javic Piotr Thane is born, he is a lively, mischievous baby. His eyes are bluer than the waters surrounding the Boeshane Peninsula and seem like they’ll always sparkle with enthusiasm. He’s certainly something special for a Boeshane boy. 

When Gray Thane is born, he is silent with solemn eyes too large for his face. He’s placed in the stubby arms of his older brother, barely out of babyhood himself. Gray gurgles happily for the first time and latches on firmly to his older brother’s finger. Javic vows at that moment to never let go of Gray. 

Less than a decade later, the creatures that Boeshane children are raised to fear attack, and Javic is the most scared he’s ever been in his young life. In the chaos that follows, he’s forced to do the one thing he vowed never to. He lets go of Gray’s hand. It’s the first regret of his very long life.

**2\. Became Jack Harkness**

Javic Piotr Thane might be the best Time Agent; he’s ruthless, efficient, clever, makes the hard decisions without hesitation. He manages to control the man who will become John Hart.

He might also be the worst Time Agent. Sloppy paperwork. Disrespectful of his superiors. Lazy, selfish, and greedy. Oversexed even for the fifty-first century. Amoral.

The Boeshane boy who lived under the guilt of his brother, who persuaded his best friend to become a soldier and watched him die, and who signed for the Time Agency hoping to escape the shadows of war was lost in the ten years he bled as a Time Agent.

When Javic wakes up missing two years, he doesn’t hesitate to leave and spends a handful of years as a con man. He lands in 1941 London and takes the name of a dead man.

Captain Jack Harkness is a dutiful, moral soldier, a confident leader, a good man. The man formerly known as Javic Thane doesn’t realize this until he meets his name’s owner.

Jack Harkness wears his name for billions of years. He doesn’t realize that the name of a dead man helped make him a good man.

**3\. Met the Doctor**

Jack Harkness arrives in 1941 London an amoral, selfish con man wearing a name that isn’t his own. He leaves with two of the greatest people he’s ever met and knowing that his life will never be the same but not really understanding.

The Doctor might be the most brilliant man in the universe and reminds Jack of the Boeshane boy he left behind over two decades ago. Rose is beautiful and bright-eyed but most importantly, so wonderfully human. Falling in love with them is not a choice as much as it is a gift.

One of the few constants of Jack’s long, long life is the Doctor. No matter the year, decade, or century, he knows that the Doctor will be out there - in some shape or form - flying across the universe in their TARDIS.

Jack is a loyal man. He’ll never stop loving the Doctor; he’ll die for the Doctor without regret or hesitation, be it another mad Time Lord or Cybermen several lifetimes later.

He doesn’t need the Doctor to love him back.

**4\. Became a fixed point in time and space**

Call him Javic Thane or Jack Harkness or the Face of Boe, but he was always meant to be remembered longer than the blip in time his life would be, and Rose and Bad Wolf only ensured that. 

In the early days of his new life, Jack is bitter and cautious, but he carries the curse of a hero. He’s coaxed back easily to help those who can’t help themselves.

In his old age, the myth of Captain Jack Harkness lives on, so much so that humans and aliens risk their lives to find him, to convince him to save their worlds. If he can, he never denies a plea for help.

Jack Harkness burns so brightly and boldly and for so long in the universe that even the Doctor was forced to take back their words. He’s a fixed point in time and space, a constant, and he’s outlived empires, worlds, and even whole solar systems. He’s loved and lost some of the universe’s best. He’s not wrong. He might be the rightest thing in the universe. 

**5\. Got married (for the first time)**

Her name is Nesta, and for a woman who barely comes up to his shoulder, she’s unbelievably feisty.

They meet when Jack’s commanding officer - her father - invites him to his family manor while Jack’s on leave, and Nesta serves him tea.

Outside of Torchwood, she’s the first person Jack has met who glances up at the stars instead of the dusty Cardiff streets since the turn of the century. They have a whirlwind courting and marriage, two years of happiness before Jack’s off to fight in the Great War.

He comes back a bit quieter but more alive than most of the men, and they have a happy few more years until a tragic fire takes the lives of the Harkness family - Jack, Nesta, their toddler son, and their unborn daughter.

In his grief, Jack agrees to join a travelling circus where he’s allowed to shoot himself in the head repeatedly, failing to drown his demons. He doesn’t attempt domesticity for another few decades.

When Lucia takes Melissa with her, Jack tries not to think of the daughter he lost.

**6\. Was Torchwood**

In the beginning, he despises Torchwood for the life they’ve forced him into. He despises this dusty, dirty, backwards century and how the Torchwood Institute is wrong about the Doctor.

Torchwood Cardiff grows to be different as the years pass. Unlike Torchwood One, Torchwood Three is made of individuals. He makes friends and lovers and then loses them time after time.

When Alex shoots himself in the head, Jack is scared. His time on Earth is running out, and he’ll find his Doctor soon, but someone’s going to have to lead humanity into the twenty-first century, and it looks like it’ll have to be Jack.

Jack doesn’t know when he became Torchwood, but his years as the leader of Torchwood are some of the best of his very long life. He’s proud of his team, of Owen, of Tosh, of Gwen, and especially of Ianto.

Thousands of years later, when he’s followed humanity to the stars and all that’s left of Torchwood is him and an asteroid, he rests in peace knowing that the memory of his team will live forever in the Torchwood Archive.

**7\. Loved**

Besides the Doctor, the other constants in Jack’s life are love and loss.

At the Time Agency, when Javic is trapped with the future John Hart, he learns to see past his immorality. Javic truly does love him, but they are both heading for an unavoidable collision course. 

The Doctor and Rose give Jack a chance at a new life. He has a home with Nesta. Angelo betrays him. Lucia gives him a daughter but leaves him nonetheless. Gwen gazes at the world like Rose did.

He’ll always lose them, but in the end, it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.

He finds an ironic counterpart in River Song. She’s a remarkable woman. Jack loves her, but time is their enemy. They could never have a future.

Out of all the loves in Jack’s life, Ianto Jones is possibly the greatest. He is the only one Jack wanted to become mortal for, wanted to grow old with. 

It’s a known fact of the universe that Jack Harkness loves Ianto Jones until his final dying breath.

**8\. Visited the Boeshane Peninsula**

As he enters the fifty-first century, Jack finds himself tracing his family tree. 

He watches his parents meet and fall in love. They’re both hopeless romantics, just like a young Javic Thane was, and decide on an archaic traditional Earth marriage. Jack is at the wedding, a guest from neither side.

They decide to settle in Franklin’s home world of Boeshane. 

Jack only dares bump into his parents once and introduces himself as a well-meaning stranger. He watches his mother, bright-eyed and intelligent, and his father, brave and a better man than Jack could ever be, and wishes Ianto could meet them.

He watches himself with Gray, two joyful children playing in the sand, and wants to protect them from the cruel world, but he can’t.

When his father dies and his mother falls apart with grief, he becomes a well-meaning stranger and ensures young Javic is sent to the orphanage. He watches River save his life during a raid.

Javic Thane was never meant to live a quiet, ordinary life with his family on the Boeshane Peninsula, but sometimes Jack Harkness wishes he was.

**9\. Remembered**

It is the curse of the one who lives to remember all who died and all he lost, but as time wears on, Jack becomes grateful for it.

It’s a sad fact, but he’s become accustomed to death from a young age. Javic lost his father but also essentially his mother and brother. His best friend.

There’s so many others. His first and second Doctors. Nesta, Lucia, Alice, Steven. Rose, Jackie, Martha, Mickey. Owen, Tosh, Ianto, Gwen, Rhys.

Only Jack is left to remember all he’s lost; they remained immortalized in his memory.

There are some memories he keeps with him until he dies a final time: a night on the beach with his parents and Gray, drinking with the man who will be John Hart, his first Doctor spinning Rose around in the TARDIS, arguing with Lucia, holding a baby Melissa in his arms, Ianto’s laugh and the way his body moved under Jack’s, Gwen’s gap-toothed smile, Tosh’s eyes gleaming as she hacked the Ministry of Defense, Owen triumphant having saved another life, running with Martha and his second Doctor, Jackie Tyler telling him off, Alonso’s cute blush, River’s curls whipping around in battle, singing Christmas carols with Carla and Persis.

Jack keeps these memories alive, if not for him but for the universe to remember.

**10\. Saved the world (one last time)**

Thousands of years and lifetimes later, the Face of Boe has a chance to see his beloved Doctor and Rose again, and he understands that time has looped itself around.

Although he sees his second Doctor again, it’s not too long before Novice Hame brings him and Martha Jones to his side. She is impossibly young; he remembers being by her bedside, her face lined but still as beautiful as she was decades previous, and promising to watch over August and Mickey. Now, she stands before him, and he feels ancient and tired.

He knows his time has come, and to be honest, he’s grateful, relieved. Immortality had been wearing a little long for him.

“You are not alone,” he says to the Doctor, resigned at the path he’s sending the Time Lord, Martha, and his younger self on.

With his dying breath, the Face of Boe uses his life energy to open the motorway roof back up, saves the city of New New York, loves everyone he’s lost, and remembers. It’s a fitting end for a man who spent most of his lives saving others.

In his final death, Jack Harkness is reunited with those he loved the most and finds peace.

That is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr [here](http://princess-of-the-worlds.tumblr.com/) or on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/rajkumarinik) to let me know how much you liked this fic or request a prompt. Also, please comment or drop a line below even if it's to telling me how you've been doing. I thrive on kudos and social interacting, especially in this day and age.


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